Friday 24th October was a fun filled day for Cogapp at the Women in Media conference held at the Old Market, Brighton. With talks from the likes of Leapfrogg, Yahoo International and The Next Women, the conference drew on the experiences of women in Web, T.V, Music and Games.

Supporting the conference, we had our own stand fully supplied with bags of Jelly Beans containing our business and blog cards. With delegates amounting to around 100, we certainly talked to a varied audience ranging from graduates to the more experienced women (and several men) in media. I even had the opportunity to talk to an entrant into Cogapp’s Codeo competition.

The Women in Web portion covered the importance for websites to appeal and address their female audiences. Jennie Lloyd, Nixon McInnes, commented that females are 10% more likely to blog than their male counterparts. The popularity of online communities such as iVillage (which discusses key female issues) and sites like handbag.com (which covers fashion, beauty and celebrity gossip) are illustrative of growing female engagement with the web. It is therefore crucial that females feed into the building of the web rather than just using it. Advertisers targeting predominantly female audiences including L’Oreal, Venus and Johnson & Johnson made up a large percentage of the $1bn spending on online advertising for the 2008 Olympics. The high volume of websites, communities and advertisers, which address these active female audiences, should be a key factor for encouraging more women into web related jobs, in order to contribute their input and address these audiences on a deeper level.

My final point is how the conference really dealt with reassuring its audience that the media industry is not as daunting and scary as it seems for women (or anyone else for that matter!) The majority of speakers at the event originated from a non-media background. One came from the Anthropology field and another had studied Zoology. I was really inspired by Rosie Freshwater at Leapfrogg, who had worked her way up, having had no design or technical skills in her early years. After being made redundant, while pregnant, she set up her own business, which she now continues to run. Coming from a retail and print marketing background, I am a firm believer that your skills are transferable across industries and so my advice is not to be put off going into unknown territories.